For years, enhancing the diversity of newsroom staffs has been a
central priority for reformers both outside and inside the news media,
particular within the rarified media elite. Of course, when they talk
about more “diversity,” media chiefs almost always mean increasing the
percentages of women reporters, African-American reporters,
Asian-American reporters, Hispanic reporters, or representatives of
other demographic minorities. Their argument: a newspaper or television
station cannot be fair and balanced if its staff does not reflect the
community they serve.

The media have taken the need to improve their
demographic diversity very seriously. The American Society of Newspaper
Editors (ASNE) each year categorizes more than 50,000 individual
newsroom employees to determine the precise percentages of minorities
and women who work at the nation’s newspapers. The editors’ October
1998 statement on diversity insisted upon the following goal: “The
nation’s newsrooms must reflect the racial diversity of American
society by 2025 or sooner. At a minimum, all newspapers should employ
journalists of color and every newspaper should reflect the diversity
of its community.”

But when it comes to the political and ideological
make-up of newsrooms, the media’s pro-diversity logic breaks down. On
the one hand, those who wish for more demographic diversity say
reporters are not interchangeable — a white male reporter and an
Hispanic female reporter, for example, would make different decisions
about how to cover a news story as a consequence of their different
backgrounds and experiences. Thus, a diverse news staff would help a
news organization remain sensitive to all sides, resulting in better
and fairer news coverage.

But few in the media acknowledge the corresponding
requirement for ideological diversity. While it seems obvious that
audiences would benefit if the news, especially political news, was
reported and edited by a diverse mixture of liberals, conservatives and
moderates, most influential media figures deny that journalists’
political views affect the news. Either journalists are so lacking in
ideology, or their professional norms are so strictly enforced, that it
makes utterly no difference whether newsrooms include more liberals —
and far fewer conservatives — than the communities they cover.

All of these studies show the news media are far
more liberal than the public, and the most elite news organizations —
the networks, big newspapers and newsmagazines — are the most liberal
of all. The Media Research Center’s documentation of media content over
the past two decades shows this liberalism does skew the news.

Journalists, after all, are not robots — their
profession requires them to make choices. Liberal journalists often
choose story topics that represent a liberal agenda, they choose to
interview liberal-leaning policy experts, and they question officials
from a mainly liberal perspective. At the same time, they rarely choose
to focus on issues representing the conservative agenda, they choose
to minimize the number of conservative policy experts they interview,
and they rarely challenge public officials with questions representing a
conservative point of view.

Individually, such decisions may be entirely
defensible, but collectively they push news content to the left. And
while conservative journalists may make entirely different choices,
introducing a rightward bias, it is an indisputable fact that liberals
in the media vastly outnumber the conservatives.

It’s not a vast left-wing conspiracy, but the
effect is the same. The media elite would like us to believe that their
news is impartial, objective and non-partisan. But the news they
produce is slanted — tilted in favor of liberal policies and liberal
politicians and against conservative policies and conservative
politicians.

If news reporters were as ideologically diverse as
their readers and viewers, it follows that much of the bias that
tarnishes the media elite would disappear. If executives, editors and
producers insisted on equal treatment of conservatives and liberals,
much of the public’s confidence in the news media ability to be fair
and objective would be restored.

The public clearly sees the media’s bias. It is up to the media to acknowledge it.

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